In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe.

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.

It’s very disappointing when a book is literally perfect in almost every way… except for one huge, glaring misstep that keeps it from being flat out perfect.

In this case, I adored Of Beast and Beauty. I am infamously hard to impress when it comes to Beauty and the Beast retellings — it’s my favorite fairytale, so I have high standards about how it’s done.

This retelling hits all the right notes, including some amazing twists on how things unfold. The world building is wonderful, clearly well thought out and with its own rules on how it operates.

The characters are complex and all too human in the best ways, especially Isra and Gem. At first I wasn’t certain with how the pacing of their relationship went, but Jay made it believable and heartwarming.

I stayed up late to get more than halfway through, and as soon as I was finished with breakfast the next morning, I cracked it open again to keep reading.

What, then, was my issue? Well…

The curse placed on the planet means that not only does the land slowly die, except for the land under the domed cities, but that large amounts of people are born with Monstrous or not fully whole features — children with three fingers, people with no arms and legs, etc.

The curse, when or if it’s broken, will make them “whole” again.

I had a tremendous issue with this. It’s a common belief of disabled people that they are broken and long to be “fixed”. Their lives are believed to be inherently lacking because they don’t have the features some other humans do, and how this sole fact must rule over their lives.

If the curse had been done in any other way, I would be throwing this book left and right at people to get them to read it. As it is… I don’t know. I loved it. I really did. It’s one of the best retellings out there at the moment, and I’m sure I’ll reread it again.

But I can’t, in any good conscience, recommend it wholeheartedly because of that one little fact. I’m always going to warn people that it didn’t handle one issue particularly well, and it breaks my heart that I have to do that.